A 3M engineer’s basement experiment.

Magnepan is the company of one inventor, Jim Winey. Born in 1934, he studied industrial engineering at Iowa State University and worked for John Deere and then for 3M in Minnesota, according to his obituary. An audiophile, he spent his evenings in his basement designing loudspeakers, The Absolute Sound’s Jonathan Valin wrote in January 2024.

The spark, Valin recounted, was an unusually lifelike electrostatic speaker Winey heard at a Minneapolis hi-fi shop owned by William Z. Johnson, who went on to found Audio Research. Winey considered building his own electrostat, but instead glued a rudimentary voice coil to a two-foot strip of thin, flexible 3M magnetic material and fed it a signal from a Dynaco amplifier. The sound was limited in bandwidth and volume but realistic enough that he decided to perfect the idea.

In June 1969, The Audio Beat reported on the company’s 50th anniversary, Winey left his engineering job at 3M to found Magnepan in White Bear Lake, north of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, raising start-up money from about thirty friends and family members by demonstrating a prototype. The company’s own account is brief: “In 1969, Jim invented the Magneplanar, a thin-film magnetic equivalent to the electrostat and founded Magnepan.” The company began in shared industrial space in White Bear Lake before building its own factory there.

A new kind of transducer.

Valin wrote that it is rare for a designer to invent an entirely new type of transducer, and that Winey did. A Magneplanar — “Maggie” to its owners — has no box and no cone. Its diaphragm is a very thin sheet of Mylar with fine wires or foil strips bonded to its surface as the voice coil; behind it sits an array of flexible ferrite strip magnets, about 1.5 mm thick, English Wikipedia says, “like refrigerator magnets.” Current from the amplifier moves the whole film, and because the panel is open front and back, it radiates as a dipole. The panels have a low impedance and are known for needing powerful amplifiers.

By 1971, according to Valin, Winey was selling the Tympani I, a huge three-panel speaker with two bass and midrange panels and a narrow planar tweeter. Johnson’s Audio Research was Magnepan’s first distributor. Winey also designed what The Audio Beat called the first large-scale ribbon tweeter, used in later Magnepans, and a tonearm, the Unitrac, which sold more than 10,000 units.

The business boomed. The Audio Beat reported that in the late 1970s and 1980s Magnepan shipped more than 1,000 pairs of speakers a month, and that Winey priced them as the cost of making them plus a reasonable profit. The company says that more than 200,000 pairs have been sold.

The range still follows that formula at several sizes. The current line runs from the compact LRS+ and the .7 through the 1.7i, the revived 2.7i — which the company calls “the return of one of Magnepan’s earliest creations” — and the 3.7i, up to the multi-panel 20.7 and 30.7, which English Wikipedia says replaced the Tympani. The company’s website quotes The Absolute Sound naming the LRS its Budget Loudspeaker of the Year for 2020.

Design and documentation.

American high-end audio grew into a movement in the 1960s and 1970s, with its own press: Stereophile, founded in 1962 by J. Gordon Holt, and The Absolute Sound, founded in 1973 by Harry Pearson, according to English Wikipedia.

The makers grew up far apart. In Minnesota, William Z. Johnson founded Audio Research in Minneapolis in 1970, and Jim Winey’s Magnepan loudspeaker dates from 1969. In Connecticut, Mark Levinson started his company in 1972, and Dan and Rondi D’Agostino founded Krell in 1980. In Kentucky, Thiel began in Lexington in 1976; and in California, Richard Vandersteen took his Model 2 to the 1977 Consumer Electronics Show.

Several later changed hands. The Mark Levinson name passed to Madrigal Audio Laboratories at a bankruptcy auction in 1985, and Harman acquired Madrigal in 1995, Harman says; Samsung bought Harman in 2017. Audio Research was bought in 2008 by the Italian investor Quadrivio, whose Fine Sounds group was later renamed McIntosh Group, and was sold on in 2020 and 2023. Thiel was sold to a Nashville investor in 2012 and stopped operating in 2018. Krell closed after Rondi D’Agostino’s death in 2024; its repair service restarted in 2025, trade reports say.

Today Audio Research is in Maple Grove and Magnepan in White Bear Lake, Minnesota; Mark Levinson is part of Harman, based in Stamford, Connecticut; Krell remains in Connecticut; conrad-johnson builds by hand in Virginia; and Vandersteen is in Hanford, California, according to their websites and English Wikipedia.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still in White Bear Lake, still in the family.

Unlike most of the American hi-fi makers founded in the same era, Magnepan has never been sold. We found no acquisition in the sources we checked; the online magazine hifizine described it as family-owned and family-operated after a factory visit in 2013, when Wendell Diller was its sales and marketing manager. Jim Winey died at home on 10 January 2024, aged 89, and his obituary says the company is now led by his son, Mark Winey.

The company is Magnepan Incorporated, at 1645 Ninth Street in White Bear Lake. Its website calls its products “handcrafted loudspeakers, made in White Bear Lake MN, USA,” and says “Magneplanars are American-made with virtually all American parts,” adding: “Made in America. Sold in China.” Those are the company’s claims, but there is independent support for the first: hifizine’s 2013 tour showed a wood shop cutting the MDF panel frames by CNC, and lines assembling magnets, laying voice coils onto Mylar, finishing and testing panels on site, in what it called “a 50,000 square foot shed.” The company gives its plant as more than 50,000 square feet, plus offices.

Magnepan sells through dealers and, for some models, directly. Its website now offers an “X” series, described as a premium production version, together with a service upgrade programme for existing owners, and it publishes manuals for non-current models and takes service requests.

No logo designer, typeface or brand colour is documented. Magnepan’s visual identity comes from the product: tall, flat panels with no box, which look more like screens than conventional loudspeakers. Its website, by contrast, is plain and functional.

For a design guide, Magnepan shows how a single invention, kept in one family and one town, can carry a brand for more than half a century. Compare Audio Research, its first distributor, and Thiel, another speaker maker built on one designer’s principle, which did not survive a change of owner. For this guide we use pine green, silver and oak with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Magnepan’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.